An Important Message From Conan O'Brien

two more days. funniest man on television.

-jon

old blog #2: i own a giga pet named "A".

i'm excited. november started, a huge test is finished, the next two weeks will keep me sufficiently busy but not crazy, and then thanksgiving break is going to rule. for three main reasons.
1. the wednesday before thanksgiving week, savion glover is performing at hancher auditorium at my university. most people probably wouldn't know savion glover by his name, but if you are anywhere near my age and grew up watching sesame street(one two three four five, six seven eight nine ten, eleven twelve-elve-elve-elve-elve-elve!)(pinball machine cartoon), savion was the black guy with dreds who tap danced all the time.

how could you not love this guy?

he will be performing with a live band, so...a killer tap dancer and a live band at hancher? it's gonna be a fantastic show. what makes it even better is that i have a midterm directly before the show so the show is like a huge treat. and my girlfriend is coming down for it so...how could it be better? if savion invited me on stage to dance with him? yes that would make it better. but that's the only way.
2. as i mentioned before, colleen is coming down for savion's show and then she and i are driving back to uni that night. i'm skipping the last two days of class that week and extending my break to eleven days. unbelieveable. the first five/six days will be spent at uni with friends, getting a feel for my new university. i'm psyched.
3. for actual thanksgiving, i'll be probably in kansas city. which is cool. i'm not ecstatic about going home, but it will be really nice to see my sisters again. thanksgiving day will rule. lots of food. lots of lazing around. post-thanksgiving cold turkey sandwiches are awesome.
so november is bringing good things. and i want you to know about these:

find this movie playing somewhere and watch it.

1. half nelson. i just saw it tonight and really liked it. still digesting it so i'm not even gonna say too much. other than ryan gosling is a phenomenal actor. saw it at iowa's indie theater, the bijou, which is a sweet place. one of the few things i'll really miss when i'm at uni. check this out, they are having a FREE pre-release showing of the tenacious d movie coming out, how sweet is that? i'm going.

"if you want to see the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain."

2. ricky gervais. funniest man on television? possibly. star of the office, which was originally a bbc show before it became popular here in america. and if you like the steve carell version on nbc, it's a hundred times funnier with this dude. and his new show on hbo, extras, is unbelieveably funny as well. i can't really communicate how much this guy makes me laugh through a facebook note so...just watch him if you ever get a chance.
i'm done. i've got lots of other stuff i'd love to tell you about but it's late. so happy november. i hope you'll enjoy it as much as i will. and i really need to figure out how to communicate ideas in some other way than a numbered list. that is so trite. and i'd like to know how to make my photos bigger. adam? anybody?

jon

p.s. i really hope somebody understood my pinball machine cartoon reference. if you did will you let me know? i have never, in my entire life, met anyone who knew what that meant other than my older sister hannah. so if you know what that is, tell me. i'll probably freak out.

thoughts from 2009 jon:

a. i wrote this on november 3, 2006.

b. savion glover is an INCREDIBLE dancer. that show was one of the coolest live performances i've ever seen.

c. half nelson is still a great movie. watch it if you haven't.

d. i'm going to write more in depth about ricky gervais' brilliance sometime in the future.

e. i needed to ease up on the list format. i used TWO numbered lists in this one post. confusing

f. the pinball sketch. number 11:

old blog #1: Web + Log = Blog

I used to think the whole concept of blogs was really arrogant, like it's just one person going on some rant thinking everybody else really wants to hear their thoughts and opinions about the world. and what do I know, maybe lots of people do want to hear the the writer's thoughts. it's just the whole idea that the writer thinks his thoughts should be read/heard by everyone. it just seemed high-handed to me. until lately. i recently read a fantastic review of FutureSex/LoveSounds in a friend's note, and it really convinced me that blogging is alright. not conceited, just a handy way to let people get into your mind a little if they want. ok enough of this intro. here are some things i've been into for the last week or two.

1. Most people know i'm not a huge sports buff, but even I was following the World Series. and while i don't have a tv, i spent game 5 clicking the refresh button on si.com every 30-60 seconds. it made for an exciting night. go cards.

2. organic chemistry...as much as that might be lame, it's actually really interesting to me. unfortunately i'm not smart enough to be a chem major. shame. it's cool now that we're actually getting into practical stuff, we can do all sorts of reactions and crap. actually not in real life, but on paper, i can do reactions involving alcohols and ethers and epoxides. pretty cool.

It's called 18-crown-6 because it has 18 total atoms in the ring and 6 total oxygen atoms...and it looks like a crown.

3. bob dylan. he's just really good. that's all.

4. this whole "my shares" deal on facebook is really cool. at least to me. it's weird, i really thought that this blog feature and now the shares would catch on really fast, but not many of my friends write many notes, and so far the shares thing hasn't gone over too well. which is really too bad, because it's a way cool thing. i've only put up a few things, but i'll add quite a bit as time goes on.

5. i read today that reese witherspoon and ryan phillippe separated? i'm pissed.

Come on. Seven years of gorgeous red carpet snapshots and you're calling it quits?

6. i'm transferring to uni.

so that's all. i have to look over some notes for a biology quiz tomorrow. my bio t.a. has such a big butt, it's really hard not to stare. and he's a dude...so it gets a little awkward. but it's just so big! later.

jon

p.s. Mathmatical equations - actual numbers = really annoying.

thoughts from 2009 jon:

a. this blog was written october 30, 2006.

b. the friend i was referring to who wrote the album review was adam. you can read that blog here on facebook and his actual blog is here. great stuff.

c. the thing about my shares on facebook was way back when facebook was intuitive and cool. remember, back when high school and college were separated? when "apps" didn't exist? when you actually had to be in school to get an account? anyway, the notes feature was brand new and it was an easy way for me to start blogging without having to sign up for an actual blogging site, which i thought was lame.

d. the post script was referring to when people write sentences like "britney spears + last few years = so white trash!" i think i had read a sentence like that before i wrote it and it annoyed me.

e. since the font from facebook carried over to this website, i think i'm just gonna leave it as it is. it's a little disfunctional it seems like but it'll have to do.

old blogs.

tonight i was on facebook and i remembered that i originally started blogging using facebook "notes," and after a few i decided to switch over to blogspot. i don't regret the decision, as facebook as become overridden with so much pap. anyway, i glanced through my old notes tonight and decided to add them onto this mug because a lot of them showed quite a bit of insight into how i write today. reading a few of them i was actually envious of how well thought out i think they are. so i'll start with my oldest one and add them every few days and maybe add a couple two-and-a-half-years-later edits/thoughts to them.

enjoy,

-jon

whatever works.

great news. the trailer is finally out for whatever works, a new comedy written and directed by woody allen. that's not the great news. the great news is that it stars larry david. for the uninitiated, larry david co-created seinfeld along with jerry seinfeld and currently stars in curb your enthusiasm on hbo. i wasn't allowed to watch seinfeld growing up, so i never really got into it when i was younger, and i've only recently started to watch it more often, and it's funny. but it's definitely no curb your enthusiasm. the character of george was based on larry david, but nobody plays that character better than larry david himself, and that's why curb is funnier to me.

can't get off track. i just watched the trailer and while it's clearly no annie hall, it looks like the funniest woody allen movie i've seen in a while. and finally, FINALLY, a woody allen movie that doesn't star the insufferable scarlett johansson. gosh i hate that woman. larry david is just a funny guy. he has funny mannerisms, his cadence is funny to me, his face just makes me laugh. and while the supporting cast isn't full of any of my favorites, it still looks solid enough to make for a very good woody allen yarn. now i just hope it will be released somewhere around cedar falls. doubtful.

-jon

gigs #3 and #4: the hub and the hydrant.

we kind of need to find a new place to play.

#3 was pretty standard, with a few interesting things to note. it was a benefit deal for one of the art groups we have on campus, which my friend paige is a part of, and she was the one that actually asked us to play. interesting too, we actually played last, this band called the beat strings opened, which was kind of funny because they were an actual band that sounded kind of like franz ferdinand, really upbeat, high energy, and then we took the stage. two dudes with an acoustic and one with an electric. weak sauce. but anyway. we played with bruce again and i played my electric, which really made a big difference in my playing and made me NOT want to play acoustic on stage again. i just feel so limited in what my hands can translate from my brain when i play the acoustic. it suits me a billion times better to play on my strat. so it was a lot more fun this time around and i got into my groove a lot faster than before. one thing that plagued our set was the lack of practicing though. eli and i had played quite a bit the week prior to this show and we worked a lot of cool things out on certain songs and even added a brand new song to the list, but we were unable to coordinate a time to practice with bruce so he came into the gig not on the same page as eli and i. we still played well i think but it definitely could've been tighter among all three of us. another cool thing about this gig: paige sang with us. that was cool to have a girl's voice amongst our sound. the most interesting thing about this show for me though was my process of relaxation on stage. i felt alright from the get go, a titch nervous but still ok. as we played on though, it got late, and people obviously got tired and started to go. as i watched people get up and walk out, i stopped thinking completely about the audience and just started to goof off and play what i wanted. that was a lot of fun, i almost just stopped caring about whatever eli and bruce were doing and started making jokes to owen and colleen and joel, who were all sitting at a table together. it was a lot of fun. less people = more fun for me. and we debuted our new song, "mess around" by ray charles. such an awesome tune, and i'm glad we have a ray charles cover in our set. super fun to play, with a chance for me to really dig into a 12-bar blues solo, which was awesome on my strat. problems: too freakin' short. we played it and out of nowhere the song was over. it's literally done in like two and a half minutes for us, which is just far too short. not good for our set and not fun for me. so overall the gig was fine. i can tell i'm getting better about being on a stage.

#4: best gig so far, by far. absolutely the most fun i've had on a stage, and i felt like i played my best so far and really got into it. started off the show with about 0.1% nerves, which is basically negligible for me. so that was great. it was just eli and i again, with me on electric. i was a bit wary before the show whether or not it was gonna sound good with just eli on acoustic and me on electric but i really felt like we found a good sound with this set up. the crowd was great, which to me means it was mainly our friends. it was the thursday before finals week so the hydrant didn't have many patrons, and i was kind of behind a speaker so most of the people who i didn't know i couldn't even see. that relaxed me a lot right from the get go. and i finally got to see how i performed with a bit of alcohol in me, which is not bad at all. around the middle of the set i started to get a bit of a buzz and instead of making me worse at playing it was just a lot of fun. it also helped me take the song omar bay on a lot easier. omar bay is the one tune where i've got a solo but i just haven't figured out yet how to make it a good solo; it's such a weird chord progression and trying to find a good melody to solo with over this progression has stumped me. but after having a few drinks, along with playing it later in the set after i've gotten comfortable, when eli looked at me and said "omar bay?" i was like "yeah....i'm gonna get you this time, omar bay." and it was awesome.

and my strat. gosh i love playing electric so much more than acoustic. it takes a ho-hum set list for me and turned it into something really enjoyable to be a part of. we played some really rockin' tunes too, the weight sounds great with me on electric, and we finished off our last set with hooch, and kevin actually came up and freestyled a little over this super funky groove we found. that's the kind of stuff i wish we played more of. stuff where i can really forget about being on a stage and just bob my head and play. it was super fun.

on top of that, a super fun one was mess around by ray charles. we ended our first set with it, and it's such a good set closer, except that it is just so short. solution is just to figure out how to medley it with another tune, preferably another ray charles tune if we could. i'm thinking i don't need no doctor, i got a woman, possibly what'd i say. figuring out how to medley a few tunes will be my project as soon as this week is over.

no more gigs on the horizon right now, but whatever else comes, i sincerely hope they are like #4. oh yeah i'm done with the semester too. awesome. two more classes and i'm out of college. holler.

-jon

p.s. my font changed for some reason unbeknownst to me. i tried for like thirty seconds to get it the same as the others but then i got lazy. so i guess just deal with it for this one post. sorry.